An emoji is a regular Unicode code point, so once your page declares <meta charset="utf-8"> you can paste 🎮 or 🚀 directly into the markup and it renders. No special tag required.
For accessibility, wrap a meaningful emoji in <span role="img" aria-label="rocket"> so screen readers announce it; mark purely decorative ones aria-hidden="true". Rendering varies by platform — the same emoji looks different on iOS, Android, and Windows.